Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going.

If anything qualifies as an irony of history it would be this: that Marx and Engels throughout the nineteenth century wrote about America the United States as the great country of the future, of freedom and equality and a good life for the working man, and a country of revolution and emancipation, and of Russia as the great country of despotism, backwardness, savagery and superstition.

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge. Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence